The FCBD Puzzle: Part Two

I had a publisher ask a few questions about yesterday's FCBD breakdown that got me thinking about what makes for the ideal FCBD book. For us, the key is that the book function both the day of by drawing in old and new customers as well as having legs as a promotional tool long after FCBD. Ultimately I think the latter is more important, but it's all a part of the package. The way I break down the parts of that package, in descending order of importance:

#1: Quality content that is accessible to new readers but leaves them looking for more. This can be all new material or reprint but it needs to be both really good and really easy to get into. Creators with solid track records can help alleviate retailer concerns about this when ordering.

#2: Backed up by a catalog of related titles that we can point these new readers to when they like what they see. Preferably something directly related like Scott Pilgrim, but titles by the same creator or that are similar in tone should work too.

#3: A good cover. It is SO much easier to sell any product when the first thing the customer sees is an attractive package. This year I would say that Image's Future Shock (even though the same idea was just used in New Warriors), Free Scott Pilgrim (which derives most of its essential goodness by working off of the title's play on words) and X-Men/Runaways are the most immediately striking covers (maybe that's just me, but I think they'll stand out a bit more than some of the others). The solicitation art for Bongo is horrible, but at least its not the finalized cover. Which brings me to:

#4: Good solicit copy in Previews. Neither Bongo nor Dark Horse have the actual cover featured. Probably nothing they could do about that, except maybe plan a bit farther ahead, but it makes me a bit leery about what we'll get when they show up. If there's not at least one Simpsons character on the Bongo title, it'll be a huge mistake. As for the copy itself, I was under the impression that the Star Wars/Conan flipbook was reprint material until Kurt Busiek informed me otherwise. It's helpful to know what the story will be and who's actually writing/drawing it.

#5: This is more of a corollary to #3, but stand out from the other offerings. Arcana Studio Presents, World of Aspen, Jack the Lantern, Liberty Girl, Claypool and Buzzboy are going to find it difficult to stand out on the day of because they're promoting the same sort of story/characters as Marvel, DC, Image and each other. Mr. Jean and Owly may not be as visually striking (although I prefer both of those covers to the above) but they'll stand out based on subject matter alone (as conveyed through the cover).

#6: Price. As I mentioned yesterday, we set our dollar amount and percentage of that for each title, so how many we get depends on how expensive the title is. Obviously this is going to vary because each company's printing cost is going to vary, but I would hope that the companies involved see this as an opportunity to increase their own sales and would eat some portion of the printing cost themselves (they may do this already but if so it's kept quiet).

Ultimately I think publishers should look at FCBD as a chance to expand their market by helping retailers expand ours. The retailers that last are Ultimately in this to make money and if we're going to do that its by expanding our market and turning our regular customers onto new product lines.

NYCC: MacGuffin's Last Word

We'll let it drop (probably) after this, but go read this post from a psuedo insider at Reed. Pretty well covers it in my estimation.

The FCBD Puzzle

So I'm firming up my February Diamond order (my first with a full month worth of sales data). I have some general thoughts on the order itself, but by far the most difficult part of it was the Free Comic Book Day section. The key part of that of course being that, while free to customers, these titles are not free to retailers. The cost is ridiculously small compared to regular titles, but we're not making any direct money back on these (nor are the publishers I'm sure). So the question becomes, how do I estimate the amount of interest we'll have three months from now when we've got nothing but some advice from other stores to go on?

There's not really an answer to that I guess, but a big factor in my thought process is the potential to use these title even after FCBD if we have leftovers. So, I'm not going too worry about ordering to the point of having leftovers. Instead, we approached the entire day as what it is, advertising. We decided this would be our largest ad buy of the year and set a budget that would include advertising the event itself as well as well as purchasing the product. Once we broke that budget down into its components, we were left with a dollar amount to spend on the product. From there, I broke down the books themselves into a percentage of the total expense based on solicitations and legs of any leftovers. Where the hiccup presents itself, though, is the fact that each title costs a different amount, some twice what others do. So the decision was, do I figure an average price per unit and break down the percentages into units or dollars spent? From a logic standpoint, breaking it down by dollars made the most sense. Certain companies can afford to offer more support by offering the product at lower prices. Couple that with the fact that the goal is to have as much quality material available as possible and it was fairly easy to go with a dollars breakdown over units.

So, the moment you've been waiting for, a quick breakdown of how we're ordering (pending any last second adjustments):

8% - X-Men/Runaways:
To me, this seems like the title that will see the heaviest demand as well as one that has solid legs post FCBD. There are several factors in its favor, chief being the inclusion of all new material. A very close second is the coupling of a company mainstay with a title that we push in the store already. I have to give Marvel credit for going all out this year.

8% - FREE Scott Pilgrim:
This one is a bit riskier, but again, all new material with great legs and several graphic novels (presumably 3 by the time FCBD rolls around) to point people towards if they like what they see. Plus this is another title we push (and sell) pretty well.

7% - Mr. Jean:
This is the only title that I gave a higher percentage based on cost. Another title that we believe in, and one that we hope to use to broaden horizons a bit.

7% - Owly Breakin the Ice:
See Scott Pilgrim.

6% each - Funny Book #2 & Preposterous Voyages of Ironhide Tom!:
2 sets of creators and companies we like to support. These are much like Mr. Jean, aimed at diversifying our customer base.

5.5% each - Bongo Free for All & Star Wars/Conan Flipbook:
Essentially the same strategies from both companies here, using established licenses to push comics. Works for us! Reprint material, though, so not quite as useful.

5% - Superman/Batman #1:
A strong title with a couple of trades to back it up, as well as the "ongoing" series. Not even close to X-Men/Runaways, but not nearly as bad a choice as JLU alone was.

4% - Tokyopop Sneaks:
All OEL material is not helping matters here. Still its manga, so it should at least get some attention. Not the kind of legs it could've had though.

4% - Future Shock (from Image):
New material is a big plus, though I'm not a huge fan of the sampler approach. Still, Invincible, Noble Causes and Godland could get some help from this.

3.5% - Transformers Beast Wars:
Eh. But Transformers seem to still have some popularity, so there you go.

3% - Impact University:
I thought it was a pretty good idea last year and I would think there should be some interest here.

The rest is pretty evenly split among the rest of the titles. We could be way off here, and I'm sure in at least a few cases we will be. But I did the only thing that works for me lately: coming up with a makeshift solution that I don't regret a half hour later.

upBeat at the Beat

Heidi MacDonald gives a bit of a silver lining view of NYCC over at the Beat. She makes good points and it seems like a majority of those who made it into the con really enjoyed themselves (hell, I've even enjoyed reading coverage of it, which is pretty unusual). Even so, its tough to say that overall the good outweighed the bad. "The log-line is that New York Comic-con has been a 'raging success.'" Maybe, but from a couple hundred miles away it seems more like a push.

Aren't There Supposed to be Pros at Cons?

I wasn't planning to talk about this, but it sounds like trouble coming from New York, huh? Apparently no one took into account the fact that New York is a pretty big city.

First, I'm glad any thought I had of attending was only fleeting because, while it sounds like many people had a poor experience yesterday at the con, we here at MacGuffin had our best day ever. Talk about glad I missed it.

Newsarama has a pretty even handed breakdown of the facts but doesn't begin to convey the level of frustration from fans. What it completely misses the boat on, though, are anecdotes along the lines of Karen Berger, you know Queen of Vertigo, not being allowed back into the con at one point. To quote Warren Ellis on the matter, "Oh, THAT'S going to make for some interesting conversations next week."

What should be interesting to see over the next couple of days is how this gets spun. Obviously everyone involved with running the event was using the George W. Bush debate trick, circa 2000 -- lower expectations as far as possible. The problem is, they apparently believed their own PR, because there is no way they were prepared to run an even moderately successful convention (from a purely logistical standpoint) in the largest city in the US. Is this all Reed's fault? Well, despite rumors that they booked as much space as possible, yeah it is. To not be able to gauge attendance within a few thousand people, much less five or six thousand people, is ridiculous for a company that does this sort of thing on a regular basis. I'm sure all we'll see from them and their media outlets the next week is how wonderful the con was to be able to draw such astronomical numbers, beyond all expectation. But lets be serious, isn't it their job to plan for astronomical numbers beyond all expectation? Yes this is the first big convention in NYC in quite awhile, but it's not like its the first comic convention anywhere, ever in decades.

Look, logistics are tough, but I've worked on several small level conventions handling everything from booking to PR to running the whole shebang and while its not exactly easy to estimate the number of attendees who will show up on the day of, there is no excuse for booking a convention to the point that people who prepaid for attendance can not even get onto the floor.

Is there a bright side? Sure, its always nice to see this much enthusiasm for comics, and there will almost definitely be at least a few mainstream press stories to come out of it, but ultimately you have to grade the convention two ways -- a programming and attendance success, but a logistical failure.

But that's all based on secondhand information. For an entertaining frontlines breakdown, go read Chris Butcher's account from the convention floor (so good, it's almost like The Daily Show's coverage of a political convention) because he says it all much better than I can.

Reading into Our Couch

So I had someone ask me the other day if I was going to just let people sit in the shop and read if they weren't going to buy anything. You may have noticed from the pictures of the store that we've got a little reading area set up with a comfy couch and chair, plus couple more chairs by the door. As I'm sure you could guess from our decision to set the store up that way, I don't have a problem with people reading in the store (assuming they don't damage the product in the process). My general philosophy is that someone either wants to own a book or not. If they do, they'll either buy it or steal it. So long as I curtail the stealing part, that leaves my customers as those who want to own the book. What reading the book does (rather than just flipping through with several furtive glances at the cashier to make sure he doesn't think you're trying to read the whole thing in the store) is allow the customer the opportunity to change their mind. On occasion that means that they will be disappointed and not purchase the book, on other occasions they will like what they see so much that they'll buy the book (and possibly other related books). I'd rather have someone buy less this visit but feel good about those purchases when they return next time.

Even those customers who choose not to buy a book after reading some or all of it are likely to then spend that money on something else. Seeing as they are already in the store, its fairly likely that they'll get another book and even more likely that they'll feel comfortable enough to come back later and find out if they want to buy something else. And when that next Scott Pilgrim that they just have to get comes out, I feel like they'll come to MacGuffin because we've made it comfortable for them to be in the store.

Then there are those customers who, quite frankly, can't afford to buy as much as they would like. That doesn't mean, however, that they never will be able to afford everything that they would like to buy. Going back to the last point, it may build up a small bit of loyalty to MacGuffin if they don't constantly feel the pressure to buy something when they are in the store. And when they have the money to get more, hopefully they remember us as a nice place to shop.

Our philosophy goes against common sense for some retailers, but a big part of what we're trying to accomplish here is changing the notion of what a comic book store is. Every store owner has the right to set up whatever restrictions they feel are necessary in their store, but you will see a PLEASE READ sign before you will ever see a NO READING sign in MacGuffin.

A Not So New Voice

I meant to point this out a few days ago, but not he's got another post up to comment on, so all the better. Robert Scott, proprietor of Comickaze Comics Books in San Diego has started up a blog. If you're interested in retailing comics in any way, shape or form, he's someone you need to get in touch with, if nothing else because he founded The Comic Book Industry Alliance, which is pretty much invaluable to store owners old and new.

I don't actually agree with some of his thoughts on Fell, mainly because I'm not particularly concerned that there's going to be a flood of $1.99 titles. Even if there are, I don't see this as a bad thing in and of itself. It simply becomes a matter of sorting out the wheat from the chaff, as with any other format. I do agree, though, that this is a title that could/should be used to expand the market given a focused marketing campaign (one that doesn't seem to be forthcoming).

Also, he's just started up a series on what's wrong with the market as it stands (presumably to be followed by how he'd fix it) that should prove interesting.

rePrint on Demand

So Marvel has announced another sellout (this one happened even before the title hit shelves) and another reprint. But wait, what have we here? No new cover? Couple that with the decision to reprint Incredible Hulk #92 (despite indicating in the initial press release that no such reprint was planned) and I may have to eat my words a bit. While Marvel will not be collecting Planet Hulk until the end (not necessarily my preference, but if it turns out to be the proper format for the finished work, I won't argue) the fact that they are willing to keep a title with some potential legs in print is encouraging and I therefore rescind my earlier criticism that Marvel was following in DC's footsteps by putting a greater emphasis on retailers (and to a lesser extent readers) to order up front.

I understand that it is better for everyone involved if the industry knows exactly how much demand there will be for a title before it is printed so that publishers could then print exactly that number and send each store exactly what each store would need. Unfortunately we live in the real world. So it's nice to see that Marvel has, to a large degree, realized that Jemas' insanity of printing to order is self defeating when it comes to growing the sales of midlist titles (and lets be honest, anything without Spider, X or Ultimate in the title is pretty much midlist at Marvel right now).

I like the direction Marvel seems to be shifting, even if it's only because they see more money in that direction (and with a big ole event coming up, they have to plan accordingly). Since Marvel seems to be structuring Civil War as an ongoing conflict rather than a single House of M type story, it will be important to keep early parts of the story in print if they are going to effectively springboard coverage like they got in the NY Times into line wide growth. What's even nicer to see is that Marvel is reacting to the concerns of retailers, even going so far as to "experiment" with a reprint sans a new cover image.

Treading Cautiously

We all see the trend and everyone's holding their breath, hoping that these big events from Marvel & DC won't lead to an explosion of the market followed by and immediate implosion. Tom Spurgeon speculated on the fallout of Infinite Crisis and makes some good if pessimistic points. He does point to the level of talent that DC is putting behind this revamp, but he does seem to be on the right track about the difficulty of promoting an entire line of comics the size of the DCU. What got me thinking, though, was how much better these events themselves could be used to infuse both the Marvel and DC universes with a line wide bump in creativity/exposure.

Over at The Savage Critic(s), Graeme's take on Action Comics (scroll down a bit -- go back and read the rest of his reviews later) sets up the biggest problem with building off of an event like DC's Infinite Crisis: everything outside of the event becomes kind of pointless until the event is over. I mean, seven months? Really? The story thus far takes place over the course of a couple days. DC clearly understood this problem, though, because they figured out a way to start dealing with the fallout from the event before it was actually over, namely by dealing with the fallout from the fallout. Clever.

My query, though, is why, why, why couldn't Infinite Crisis have been one big old story, published as a single entity, rather than stretched out over 7 excruciating months, thereby ruining the regular titles DC publishes? Maybe they don't care because they have ONE YEAR LATER (dun, dun, DUN) to rehook the readers, but why let them off that hook in the first place? Several people smarter than I have pointed out that a jump like that provides just as much chance for a reader to jump off a title as jump on. Why is DC waiting half a year to give the line a kick in the pants? And don't even start on the time it would take to get the project done. We've been hearing about how much planning has gone into this thing, and I'm quite sure they could have gotten Johns, Jiminez, Perez and company going on this thing early enough to put it out as a single collection. Then maybe the last couple months of DC titles wouldn't be so ridiculously pointlessly, anti-climactic.

Sure it runs contrary to Didio's stated intention to return the industry to reliance on singles and sure it kills a month or two of buzz, but DC has already gotten a years worth of buzz out of the concept of Infinite Crisis and its not like One Year Later wouldn't have kept that buzz going. It just seems like the only solution anyone could come up with to avoid treading water for seven full months was to tread water for four or five months and jump into the future. 52* looks interesting an all, but I would've preferred someone think a little farther outside the box instead of patting themselves on the back for pulling off the complicated logistics of coordinating a bunch of series sitting in neutral.

Back to Press

Tomorrow will mark the debut of our newsletter, MacGuffin Gazette (formerly Brand MacGuffin -- a little help with the title please -- anyone?). It'll be a bare bones sales tool at first, primarily a way to highlight what's new and what's on the horizon. Not exactly Comix Experience's Onomatopoeia, but we'll see how it goes.

The first issue will be pretty simple, a list of new releases, what's coming next week, what we recommend in a general, a spotlight on one of those titles and maybe a few comic news blips. While primarily an in store promotional tool, I'm hoping that I can convince a few stores to let me leave some copies out because we need to get more word out.

Everything was trending pretty well the first couple of weeks, slowly but surely improving. There's something about Valentine's Day, though, because it was one of our best sales days, followed immediately by four of the five worst sales days we've had, including by far our worst Saturday (yeah, yeah, the weather was nasty that day). As with any new store, it's early, so there's good days and bad days, but you string several bad days in a row like that, it sets the nerves on edge. The upside of being so slow (half full, half full, half full) was that I was able to work up a decent new flier/coupon and the newsletter. As I said we'll see how it pans out.

Now for the interactive portion of this evening's entertainment -- what sort of content would YOU suggest for such a store newsletter (and seriously, an ideas for the title)?

It's the Spice of Life

Lots of discussion of format over the weekend, sparked by Chris Arrant's well researched article on Newsarama about Fell, followed by Spurgeon's summary of new formats and finally Ellis' inaugural The Ministry.

I love seeing "new" formats particularly when it comes to singles. Anything that can help a worthy title stand out from the pack is particularly welcome, a big reason I like the format of the Ignatz (buy Ganges!) line. On the other hand, I prefer longer works in a smaller format, particularly because if they get much bigger it'll be like trying to carry around a dictionary. As I said a few days ago, though, the format of the book should fit the content, rather than trying to fit the proverbial square peg into a 22 page hole. A standard sized comic shrunk down to a digest size is just plain annoying and hurt two of the better series to come out of Marvel recently, Runaways and Sentinel. Of course, Marvel turned around and went way too far in the opposite direction with the solution, the oversized $30 hardcover version of Runaways that weighs nearly as much as the kid trying to read it. Here's an idea, how about publishing it as a series of digest sized books with art initially designed for such a size, or collecting the series in the size it was initially designed to be printed in.

Probably my favorite size for long form works is the 6 x 9 that Persepolis and the DEMO collection both used. Big enough to avoid the miniaturization problems that plague shrunken digests but small enough to carry around like any other book market trade paperback.

One tangential discussion when dealing with format related specifically to the Fell article, namely the question of value. According to my incredibly informal research, $3.00 is roughly the current limit for most consumers to try out a single that they are uncertain about and even then there has to be a creator or concept attached that is of particular interest to them. The $2.00 price point on Fell is cited by many as a reason they gave it a try, but in reality it was the fact that it was a $2.00 Warren Ellis/Ben Templesmith crime comic that got a nice publicity push as a series of one and done stories. I enjoy Fell and I think its a nice experiment for the industry, but it doesn't stretch the boundaries of the format to nearly the extent of the Ignatz or "The Louis Riel" as Spurgeon calls it. What I hope most people take away from the apparent success of Fell is the individual/serial nature, ala television shows like Lost, 24 or even Gilmore Girls. The spot that Marvel and DC have put themselves in, somewhere in between singles as individual stories and singles as an indiscriminate chunk of a larger GN is what leads to the frustration with pacing that we're seeing.

As many things as I like to see become more standardized in this industry (from UPCs to data reporting to POS systems) the format of the books themselves is one area where I like to see as much variety as possible. After all variety is . . . (told you I'd spice it up).

What Would you Recommend?

I spent a good portion of the day on Friday finally, finally setting up a section of recommended reading.

Part of the goal with the store was to highlight things that it would seem should have a broad appeal but for whatever reason don't get the level of visibility they deserve. A big part of the solution is simply to give them more shelf space, but I wonder how much gets lost because we try to get so muc onto the shelves. Hence, the recommendations section.

The big problem with a section for recommendations is that we're already out of shelf space. Singles are selling very poorly thus far and I think a big reason is that they get so little space. Problem is, we're stocking so many trades and graphic novels that we don't have a lot more space to give them. Knowing that we needed to find more space in the store, though, I did a breakdown of titles and copies for each of our sections and discovered that our largest section, Adventure (which includes most of the superhero stuff plus a bunch more) could be consolidated pretty easily by cutting down on the number of titles that are faced out. By spining series with a trade dress like Ultimate Spider-man we were able to save space without sacrificing much in the way of visibility. Solution in hand, the next decisions were where to put this new section and what to do with it.

Because these decision were pretty closely linked it became a matter of deciding which element was a higher priority, giving more space to the singles or creating a recommendations section to highlight titles with sales potential. One factor that played heavily into the final decision was the request by a customer a few days for a recommendations section. We had spent a few minute talking about what we liked and he asked why there wasn't a recommendation section. He thought it would help since we carry a lot of stuff that may be unfamiliar to the general public. Still those black shelves for the singles are pretty small and were already getting full. So, we decided to sort of split the difference and incorporate both ideas into the section, plus an additional creator spotlight that I'd wanted to set up. We're using one of the tall bookshelves and devoting the top shelf to the creator spotlight, two shelves to recommended trades and the bottom three to recommended singles/series.

With that decision made we were left with deciding where to put this new section. It seems to make the mose sense initially to put it up front, but once I started looking into it a bit more, I discovered that many bookstores that have a section for staff recommendations put it more towards the back because it tends to be a section that certain customers seek out. There's even a store in Texas that moves it around so that customers will have to see all of the store in order to get to that section. We're not going that far (the store's too small to try that even if we wanted to) but the idea of putting it in the middle of the store felt right. It may still get shifted to another bookshelf, but for now we're happy with its placement.

As for the titles in that section, I decided to go for a balance between titles that would be nice introductions for customers who are fairly new to comics as well as titles that lifelong fans may have overlooked or forgotten as well as offering titles for every age. Basically I tried to make it a microcosm of the store itself. I'm so happy with the result that we're going to offer a small discount plus a money back guarantee on the recommended trades and graphic novels. We'll see if that works out or not.

This was probably a bit dry, so I'll try to spice things up next time.

Yeah, what he said

He scares me a bit, but I find myself agreeing with Warren Ellis quite a bit (scarier?) particularly in his discussion of singles (by far my favorite term to refer to 32 page-ish comics). He draws the comparison I neglected a few days ago in my discussion of marrying content and format, namely the similarity between comics and TV shows (particularly when comparing the best of each).

Also, go read this incredibly entertaining exchange between Ellis and Joss Whedon.

But, yeah, what he said.

Are You Being Served?

Previously on MacGuffin:

"A lot this comes back to the question of how much room is realistically left in the Direct Market. I don't know that I've got THE ANSWER, but I do have some thoughts."

Obviously I wouldn't have plunged into comics retailing if I thought I was doomed to failure. I am firmly of the belief that there is significant potential for expansion in the Direct Market. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot of hard data available to confirm that as much more than a belief. I participated in a discussion at Newsarama in response to Brian Hibbs analysis of last year's Bookscan numbers during which a few people were swayed to share this opinion. Yet, the main support for the idea that the Direct Market can support many more stores basically consists of:

#1: Industry analyst Mel Thompson's assertion that the Direct Market is underserved:
"All of our proprietary research indicates that the Direct Market could
double or even triple in size by satisfying unmet consumer demand,
based on the current product mix and the existing propensity to consume
in the marketplace."

#2: Analyses like those by Mr. Hibbs and ICV2 which indicate the overall size of the market is growing, with growth occurring in both the bookstore and direct markets.

There are a few other similar studies on which to base the conclusion that the Direct Market has untapped potential, but as with most things in this industry, there's not a whole lot of hard data to prove any of this.

The opposite side of this coin is what I'm seeing thus far at MacGuffin. A large number of our customers have come in not because of the signage or any advertising but because we're located squarely between a Starbucks and a busy restaurant. There are a few Direct Market stores in the area already, though, so I have begun to wonder if I made a good decision on the specific location of the store and missed on the general area. There may very well be a saturation point that has been reached here while other areas receive almost no attention. In order to succeed, a store must offer something different from the other stores in the area, which I am firmly convinced that we do. Yet, the location has not led to nearly the growth we had anticipated (and I thought we had lowballed it). It certainly seems that the Direct Market is massively underserved. The difficulty is in determining where and how best to serve it.

Competitive Balance

Seems the sequential art scene is getting a bit crowded in Georgetown. The article gives a much better overview than I can but basically we're looking at something akin to the Lowes/Home Depot phenomenon. Ever notice how almost anywhere there's a Home Depot or a Lowes, the other is to be found not far away? There are two examples of this within fifteen minutes of me and I know its not a localized trend. The theory goes that these two competitors choose to be near each other because their proximity makes them both "destination" retail stores. If I need a new reciprocating saw, I can go to a single area and check two stores, comparing prices, quality etc. This creates competition which strengthens both stores meanwhile both see increased traffic.

It may feel a bit counterintuitive, but in almost every situation it turns out to be beneficial to both stores in the long run so long as both stores are willing to adapt to changes in the marketplace and clientele. Now, in Georgetown there is another issue at play, namely the similarity in store names. Personally, I would have made a bit more of an attempt to differentiate my store from competitors in every way possible, including a store name. From what I can gather from the article, it seems as though the stores do take somewhat different approaches to comic retailing, which is great for the customer and bodes well for both stores.

There is a tendency inherent to any business to view competitors as the enemy and such tendencies are only magnified in an industry that is as dependent on habit as this one. Thankfully there is a sentiment throughout much of the industry that, since the market is small to begin with, we're all in this together. As you've no doubt guessed by now, I'd much rather see the market grow than my market share grow. You can see the tendency I mentioned earlier, however, in the final quote in the article:

But that hasn't softened his stance on the name. "I have spent 20 years establishing the Big Planet Comics brand," Pollack says, "and I don't want some pissant to come along and mess with that."

I understand the branding sentiment, but the decision to refer to the competition as a pissant indicates that the anger most likely goes beyond the naming issue. There seems to be a certain element of, "I've spent 20 years establishing a customer base and I don't want some pissant to come along and steal those customers." Whether that's the reality of the situation I don't know, but I do know that there are some in the industry who feel exactly that way. Why?

A lot this comes back to the question of how much room is realistically left in the Direct Market. I don't know that I've got THE ANSWER, but I do have some thoughts.

Finding a Natural Pace

I finally read House of M. Somewhat surprisingly, I liked it. Not so surprisingly, I think I would have hated it had I read it as it came out. We all know Marvel loves Bendis and Bendis writes for the trade. The question for me becomes, why weaken the material by forcing it into 22 page increments?

Money.

Right, good point. I would love to know if Marvel would've actually lost money, though, if they had released this initially as a hardcover instead of a mini-series. Maybe that's not feasible considering this was a massive universe changing event and what if someone didn't want to pay that much, but wouldn't the Marvel zombies have gotten it anyway? And then release the trade paperback now, not so long after the fact that its irrelevant but long enough that the hardcover has had a good window to sell through. Assuming decent price points (and doesn't $24.99 seem a bit high for the House of M trade?), isn't there as much or more potential to make money off of a strategy like this as there is off of a mini-series? Or is there not enough PR mileage out of a single release hardcover compared to a miniseries that can be stretched out for a few months? I could be way off here, but I'd like to see this strategy a bit more often. Hardcovers seem to have been relegated to almost exclusively reprinting previously published material that sold well, basically making them worthwhile almost solely as after the fact collectibles. Marvel has taken a half step towards changing this with their non-deluxe hardcover collections like New Avengers and Captain America, followed shortly by the paperbacks, but we're still talking about collecting material previously conceived for a different format.

I'm not calling for the end of monthly comics or anything like that, but if a story is better suited to being published as a whole rather than broken down into parts, why not publish it that way? It may cut down on some of the complaints we all have about reading materials that clearly seems paced for another format.

Selling out the Market

Yesterday, Marvel announced another "sell-out." Ignoring for a moment the idiocy of promoting the ability to sell out of a title that the company new the demand for ahead of time, I'd like to compare the company's response to this "sell-out" (that's it for the mocking quotes, promise) with their response to selling out of nextwave.

As you may remember, last week I wrote about the less than stellar plan Marvel has for the reprint of nextwave. Possibly because my influence extends to the upper echelons of Marvel Editorial, they have decided to scrap a similar plan for part one of Planet Hulk. Or, more likely, they're stealing a page out of DC's promotion for 52. Both go to great length to point out that there will be NO reprint until the entire storyline is complete. Dan Didio likes to point out that his goal is get people buying comics on a weekly basis, to bring back that excitement of waiting for the next issue instead of the excitement of waiting for the trade. Now, trying not to be cynical, I'll assume that neither company is afraid of these "epic" stories being utter trash therefore allowing those waiting for the trade to get a heads up and avoid the product entirely.

Instead it seems like both companies are intent to destroy whatever long term success these stories may have in pursuit of short term hype. What possible economic reason could Marvel have for NOT reprinting the first issue of "this epic story destined to return Hulk to greatness?" Both companies seem to be trying to force stores to order as many copies as possible, again for fear of missing an opportunity to make a sale.

What's particularly interesting about Marvel's choice in this case is the timing. The Press Release came on the same day as Joe Quesada's latest tease with Newsarama. Quesada, understandably, is wary about retailers getting into trouble by over ordering based on hype. Now, his bigger concern is retailers inability to cope with returnability and over ordering because they can just send it back. But it stills seems a bit like the left hand not knowing what the right is doing.

What I can not wait for is the moment when the majority of those people who have real significant influence over the industry realize that keeping product available will make it much easier to expand the market and make everyone more money in the long run. Instead, we seem to have both DC and Marvel engaging in the same regressionary tactics to swallow up as much market share as possible. Pretty soon they're going choke to on it.

Design Sense

Yes, there's a new look, mainly because the blog has seen a spike in traffic the past few days and I've gotten several comments along the lines of "white text on a black background? What're you a 14 year old goth chick?"

As much as I appreciate 14 year old goth chicks, I decided we'd go with ease of use over creativity (see how that ties back into the post from a few days ago? And you thought this blogging stuff was easy).

With that out of the way, more actual content to follow.

Processing the Negatives

It only took 24 hours for Warren Ellis' advice to creators on marketing themselves to turn into a series of complaints about piss poor direct market stores. Now, I'm just going to assume that none of them are talking about MacGuffin (which is a pretty safe assumption since few of those who frequent the forum have even heard of it). All the same, there's way too much negativity out there people. Yes, we all know the stereotype of the Comic Book Guy, and we've all walked out of a store disappointed not to find anything interesting. But there is so much potential to expand every segment of the direct market and the bookstore market if every person who has a legitimate interest in seeing that happen would just make whatever effort is available to them. Whether it's opening cool new stores or just turning someone onto comics (be it manga, Fantagraphics, spandex or Calvin & Hobbes) we're at the ground level stage and what we need is more people supporting the industry in general and the quality stores/creators/publishers in particular. Guess today's a full glass day for me.

Copy Protection Faults

Warren Ellis has gotten it into his head that he needs to do some analysis the past few days. First was his assessment of Alan Moore's relationship with postmodernism. He followed that with some advice for new creators about getting their work noticed. There's ann emphasis that the retailer is the creator's actual customer which is cealry important for anyone who want to make money off of this business to understand. What I find most important, though, is how he breaks down solicitation copy. I'm not a big fan of that movie pitch method of solicitation: "It's Die Hard in a sewer with mutants!" I do like the idea of the two step approach Ellis provides, namely an interesting tag line followed by what he calls "the Element."

There's not much to go on when deciding how much of a risk to take on an unproven work/talent/publisher. Even when dealing with proven commodities, there's a fine line that few have learned to walk between giving enough information to hook the retailer and giving away plot points that can ruin the reading experience. I know I would've enjoyed Bendis' last Daredevil a lot more if Marvel had worked out "the Element" for selling Brubaker's first issue rather than giving away a huge spoiler.

Every story can be broken down into its basic elements and, while coming up with a tagline and choosing "the Element" may not be easy, no one said anything in this industry would be. Hell, I'm still working on signing up my first subscriber.

Organizing Principles

If you take a look at the pictures of the store (click on them for bigger versions, otherwise you’ll need a magnifying glass) you’ll see that most of our inventory is trade paperbacks/graphic novels and is racked on bookshelves by genre. Meanwhile the new monthly issues are organized alphabetically on black shelves toward the back of the shop.

Personally, there wasn’t much question in my mind about how to organize the majority of our inventory. One of the founding principles of the store is to create a comfortable environment that is familiar to anyone who has set foot in a bookstore. Part of that is organizing the stock not by publisher but by genre. Does Image or Vertigo really mean anything to someone whose exposure to comics is primarily through mass media? There are obvious pros and cons to genre racking (take a look at Isotope’s Great Retail Experiment and Johanna Draper Carlson’s response for a quick analysis of both) but the primary concern of any organizational system is ease of use.

While some would say that the customer we should make the process easiest for is the customer who comes in most often and spends the most money, I don’t know that I believe that. I’ve always felt that any organizational system that’s worth its salt should be designed to be new user friendly. Those who are familiar with the product understand how to find it, even if it’s not quite in the place they’re used to. Someone who knows that they enjoyed Sin City in the movie theater, however, likely has no idea that Dark Horse published those series. They could probably guess pretty quickly, though, that Sin City could be found in the mystery/crime section or the action section. While there may be some discussion as to the correct section, it wouldn’t take nearly as long to check those two areas as it would the entire store.

There’s also a train of thought that the books should be organized by creator, and while I understand the impulse, its not one that I’m a fan of. Because of the collaborative nature of so much sequential art, its role as entertainment can pretty easily be considered as an amalgam of books and film/TV. As such, I’ve taken as many cues as possible from book and film/TV retailers. Therefore our sections break down by genre and then title. Because I’m not going to be the one who decides whether V for Vendetta goes under M or L.

wave Variants

I've never really understood variant covers. Maybe this is just me, but I've never once been in the fiction section at Barnes & Noble and bought a book because of its cover. That's not to say that book covers aren't important, in fact they can be a significant element in promoting a book, just ask Chip Kidd or Warren Ellis. I may pick up a book and begin flipping through because of the cover but what I get out of that will determine whether I buy the book, not the cover design.
I love well designed covers in general, particularly covers that can stand alone as their own bit of art but that also contribute to the reading experience. What I don't understand, is the impulse to own two completely separate copies of the same book that are identical except for the cover. I would never in a million years go buy two copies of The Maltese Falcon because of what was on the cover (and I love Vintage's covers). As much as I enjoy both George Perez and Jim Lee's work, the same applies to Infinite Crisis.

We all know by now that, in rare exceptions, variant covers are designed to milk more money out of the same consumers rather than appeal to new ones. Trust me, as a new shop, we understand the impulse to try to sell as much as possible to every person who walks in the door, because there's no guarantee that person will be back or that anyone else will take their place. What's more important to us, though, is creating a comfort zone within the store so that our customers don't feel any pressure to buy anything. Now, brace yourself, but I'm of the opinion that MacGuffin and the industry in general would be much better served by increasing the size of the market rather than the market share. And let's be honest, its up to individual stores to do that, by focusing on bringing in new people and finding something they might like to read (more on that another day).

Back to the variant covers, what's particularly annoying from my perspective is a company like Avatar. How many covers did Black Gas #1 need? (answer: 1). I can almost understand a new cover for a second printing (almost) but just how hard are you trying to screw retailers by selling the same product with five different covers. Basically what you've got is an attempt by a publisher to trick its customer into quintupling the cover price without providing any additional content.

There may be a market for variant covers (though I still don't understand how) but its one that lives off of retailer's fear of losing a sale, or worse a regular customer. Combine that with the irrational belief that a shop that sells entertainment is also a place where high priced collectibles should be found and you've got the makings of a ridiculous trend.

Which brings me to nextwave. Marvel has just announced their "director's cut" version, rather than a simple reprint of the first issue. I like the idea of a director's cut, and I like that Marvel didn't really do a new cover so much as change the colors to let people know it's the director's cut. What I don't like is the decision to release this director's cut in direct competition with the initial issue. We've all been informed via Pulse and Newsarama that the first printing sold out. Most of us also know that by "sold out" what Marvel really means is that they've made all of the money they can off of those issues because they've sold out their stock to retailers. What hasn't happened, particularly in my store, is an actual sell out of the first print run. Now, Marvel sees more demand out there for this first issue and wants to offer more product to fill that demand. Great, second printing here we come, that allows the stores that have sold out to get more product to sell to those who didn't get it the first time around.

But wait, says Marvel, lets take a play out of the DVD book and add a few extras, call it a directors cut, get the people who bought the first issue to buy another one. Here's the difference: when DVD companies release a director's cut, they wait until the original "bare bones" release has had a chance to sell through, then then try to milk customers like me who love the extras and get us to buy a 2nd copy. You've seen my thoughts on this already, but I deal with it. My, admittedly selfish, problem with translating this practice to our industry is not the practice itself but rather the translation of said practice.

Marvel is mixing two different priorities: #1 provide enough product to meet initial demand for the content (best accomplished through a 2nd printing) and #2 provide a higher end product including extras for those consumers who appreciate such things and are willing to buy the same product twice in order to get the additional CONTENT. Combining these priorities leads to offering the "premium" package too quickly, putting it into direct conflict with the original "bare bones" product. On top of that, Marvel decided NOT to charge a premium price for that extra content. Therefore they will be releasing a product with more content at the exact same price as the original. Whatever copies of nextwave #1 retailers still have when the director's cut lands on shelves become nearly worthless. What makes the decision so bad is that it attempts to force retailers into the position of buying additional product by making the initial version obsolete.

If Marvel really felt there was a worthwhile market for the director's cut, fine print it, but also do a second printing of the initial release (with, gasp, the same cover) to fill the demand that already existed and allow the directors cut to fill the demand for that product that probably barely exists in the first place.

Money 1 - Ethics 0

Yesterday I had a patron buy us out of Marvel Zombies #1. Five copies left and, based on my own mission statement prior to opening the store, I should not have sold him more than 3 or possibly 4 of those copies. I have no idea what his plans for those 5 copies were, and even if he plans to sell all 5 on eBay (fairly likely since it seems to have sold out from Diamond and I saw one copy going for over $10 online) that's his choice. But before we opened I wrote a little list of rules for how I wanted to run this business and avoiding every aspect of "collecting" comics as anything other than entertainment was high on that list.

The entire store, from the inventory to the layout to the leather couch is directed towards the idea of READING comics. Again I have no problem at all with this customer buying five copies of Marvel Zombies and I hope he plans to give them to friends who enjoyed both Spider-man movies and Shaun of the Dead. But the idea of this store is to carry as much variety as possible and provide as much opportunity as possible for our customers to read those various comics.

Problem is, that was my only sale yesterday. Yeah, I know Tuesdays are slow, but when no one buys anything Monday and Tuesday is looking just as bad, suddenly a sale becomes just a little more important than it should be. So, when the voice in the back of my head piped up and asked what I was going to tell the guy who comes in tomorrow looking for Marvel Zombies #1 I told it to shut up, I'll sell him Walking Dead or something. Because who knows if anyone is actually coming in tomorrow looking for anything?